Power Harvest
Power Harvest aims to refuture our imaginations when it comes to energy generation, electrical technologies, and the power dynamics which riddle these narratives. This design project explores the viability of DIY regenerative energy projects, while challenging Eurocentric scientific and engineering norms within a (post)colonial climate emergency. Intervening at the energy-water-sanitaion-agriculture nexus, the aim of the project was to fabricate low cost biofuel cells from scratch, using non-specialist materials and equipment, and to visualise/ materialise the energy from the devices in a tangible form. Stemming from a concern that high-end investigations into renewable energy technologies are insufficient in tackling the socio-ecological issues in their reductionist approach, the project assesses the possibilities of energy democratization from a synergistic standpoint.
In a techno-economic climate where power often equals power, the project hopes for more agency to be extended to consumers
Translating cutting-edge bioenergy research into demystified, DIY forms, the art-science research project was spurred by a fascination with urine-powered Microbial Fuel Cells as they not only have the ability to produce (small, unstable amounts of) electricity, but are also able treat wastewater by killing dangerous pathogens, as well as recovering valuable nutrients that can be used as fertilizer and thus help in regenerating soil health.
The project and its process of making aims to highlights that mainstream electrical generating and consuming technologies are a product of the colonial-powered, extractivist and reductionist Eurocentric techno-scientific canon (which has and continues to have a violently profound social and ecological cost), whose trajectory is culturally (hegemonically) embedded, not absolute, and could have manifested differently. In a techno-economic climate where power often equals power, the project hopes for more agency to be extended to consumers, and for a reimagining of the complex way infrastructures relate to ourselves and interact with the natural world.
